Many personal health care products in the market today are sold containing water. The water in the formula adds to the weight and size of the products and translates into greater shipping and storage costs. Additionally, these types of products also have disadvantages in terms of packaging, storage, transportation, and convenience of use. It can also be difficult to control the dosing of liquid personal health care products. Moreover, the presence of water in personal health care products increases susceptibility to degradation of water unstable ingredients and promotes negative interactions between two or more incompatible materials in an article.
Some personal health care products are swallowable and sold as capsules, pills, caplets, and tablets and users need a drink, such as water, to consume the product. It can be inconvenient for a user to find a drink to consume a personal health care product in this form. Other personal health care products are chewable and sold as tablets. These chewable tablets do not require a drink for consumption. However, they are not durable and tend to break when the user transports them and often have a chalky flavor. Furthermore, pediatric and geriatric patients have difficulty swallowing larger oral dosage forms.
Some personal health care products are available in a dissolvable strip. However, these strips have a low loading capacity which limits the variety and amount of personal health care actives that can be added to the dosage form. Furthermore, these strips and the processes for making the strips do not offer the flexibility and rates of production that personal health care articles comprising one or more filaments offer.
Therefore, a need exists for personal health care articles that do not contain a liquid, can be consumed by the user without a drink, are durable during transport, and can contain broad ranges of health care actives and aesthetic agents, which includes higher levels of health care actives than are currently available in dissolvable strips. The filaments and personal health care articles of this invention can be delivered to the user in need via the oral cavity, mouth, throat, nasal passage, rectum, vagina, skin, eyes, ears and combinations thereof. In one embodiment, the filaments and personal health care articles of this invention interact with the moisture in the oral cavity or mouth to disintegrate and release one or more health care actives that are then consumed by the user.